Top Trump allies like Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo have floated the utterly and completely baseless conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems election management machines fraudulently swung the election to President-elect Joe Biden — and now, the company is fighting back. According to Business Insider, Dominion has sent notices of potential defamation lawsuits to Hannity, Dobbs, Bartiromo, and, outside of Fox, figures including top Trump defender Rudy Giuliani, who has helped lead Trump’s deluded fight against the election outcome.
SCOOP: Dominion sent document preservation letters warning of "imminent" defamation litigation to individual right-wing media figures, including Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo. https://t.co/sWWFUt5nes
— Jacob Shamsian (@JayShams) December 24, 2020
In the letters, Dominion demands that recipients preserve documents and copies of communications related to their company. These materials could serve as evidence during potential court proceedings, and destroying the potential evidence of potential misconduct could add to problems for the people who have targeted Dominion. Besides those top right-wing personalities, Dominion has also sent document preservation demands in anticipation of potential defamation lawsuits to Fox News, One America News (OAN) Network, and Newsmax, all of which have floated the nonsensical conspiracy theory that Dominion was involved in the imaginary fraud that some of Trump’s top allies claim plagued the election.
Dominion attorney Tom Clare commented as follows:
‘We have put Fox and Newsmax and OAN on notice that we have claims, and that we are evaluating those claims, and that we’re intending to pursue those claims. We want to make sure that not only are they preserving documents, but they’re not doubling down on these same allegations.’
Dominion has already prepared for a potential defamation lawsuit against top Trump defender Sidney Powell, who the president reportedly floated as a possible special counsel for election fraud-related issues before apparently backing down from that suggestion more recently.
Powell has pushed the nonsensical idea that Dominion, whose machines are widely used in the United States, was secretly in cahoots with an election-rigging scheme kickstarted by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez… who died about seven years ago. Clare, Dominion’s lawyer, said that if “she doesn’t retract the statements — which she’s already said she won’t — then we’re going to move forward with defamation litigation against Sidney Powell.”
At one point, Trump announced Powell as a member of his legal team, although fellow team members Giuliani and Jenna Ellis subsequently announced her apparent unceremonious firing… or something, which occurred after Powell threatened to “blow up” Georgia, metaphorically speaking, with a lawsuit amidst a slew of deluded allegations about the election. All of Powell’s election-related lawsuits have failed. Meanwhile, Clare said that Dominion is “looking very seriously at Giuliani’s out of court statements that he has made, because he has made any of the same false and damaging allegations as Sidney Powell.”
Outgoing President Donald Trump himself has pushed some of the nonsense about Dominion. At one point on Twitter, he even claimed that the company’s machines had “deleted” millions of his votes from around the country, which there is absolutely no meaningful evidence for whatsoever. The election-related conspiracy theories from Trump and his allies are unequivocally false, which is why judges across the country have rejected the nonsense.
